user experience & interaction design

macOS setup & tools

Below you will find a list of tools I use on my Macbook. The list is inspired by a post of ifun.de. But I think they did miss some useful tools and they had others which I do not need. That’s why I created my own list (it is also very handy while setting up a new machine).

Design & Prototyping

sip (free version): grab color of a specific pixel on screen. Also available for iOS.

pixelmator (30 €): at work I work with Photoshop and . more often – Illustrator. At home this one is enough (Also available for iOS now).

aurora HDR (99 €): create HDR images. Works much better than the free tools available

sketchup (free): to get my DIY projects planned, I use sketchup. The free version does it all.

linotype fontexplorer X (free): quite old version of the current font management tool. Unfortunately it is not available online any longer.

sketch (99 €): the vector drawing tool with some plugins it is really useful – also for tinkering around with some animations or documentation work. Maybe there will be a better interaction flow tool sooner or later.

Origami (free): easy to use prototyping app for macOS. Also used Framer or Kite – both not free to use, but also very good

Apple Keynote (free with your mac): can be used for simple animations and click dummies

textmate (free / open source (???)): best for coding. I am also using – aside from many others – atom and brackets, which are also free and very useful.

Productivity

locko (free): password vault – very handy. There is also an iOS-version available to sync data (deprecated now)

wifi signal (5 €): due to problems on my wifi connection at home, I tried to fix it with monitoring values and delays.

keka (free): can also encrypt archives on creation. Very handy and more mac-like. Or winzip (30 €): yes, a win-prgram on a mac. Works pretty well and got from a bundle hunt buy. Nice to manage ZIP-files and password protected files. the unarchiver (free): dezip archives quickly

EasyFind (free): find files and folders – also on external docs (which are not of my Spotlight library)

KeepingYouAwake (free): prevent mac from going to sleep temporarily (from 5 minutes to indefinitely). Like Caffeine, but more retina compatible.